Threats to Office's Dominance Multiply with New Offerings from Adobe, IBM

Paying for word processing software may soon be a thing of past if Microsoft
competitors Adobe, Google and IBM have any say.

Google already offers Google
Docs, a free hosted suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation
tools plus online storage. And, of course, there's OpenOffice,
the no-cost, open source application suite currently working on its third version.

Now Adobe has jumped into the fray with Acrobat.com,
a new beta site featuring free online hosting and collaboration tools. The suite
offers a word processor, PDF converter and Web conferencing/desktop sharing
tools.

Adobe will be integrating Acrobat.com into Acrobat 9, coming in July. Developer
APIs are available for custom integration, the company said.

"Acrobat.com enables individuals to truly work collaboratively on electronic
documents," the company said in its announcement of the suite. "Acrobat.com
delivers a new way for people to work together online."

Registration for the site is currently open.

And that's not the only new threat: IBM today unveiled the 1.0 version of Lotus
Symphony, its free application suite based on the Open Document Format
(ODF).

Symphony, released
in beta format last year, offers a word processing, spreadsheet and presentation
program. It also offers open APIs for integration with Eclipse or other frameworks,
the company said.

The free download of 1.0 is now available here,
although IBM's
Symphony blog notes that the site is experiencing "intermittent problems
with the downloads due to heavy demand."

Along with the release of the suite today, IBM announced a new "elite"
support package for large enterprises using Symphony. According to reports,
the package costs a flat $25,000.

While Microsoft offers free online collaboration tools for Office users through
its Office
Live Workspace beta, users must have purchased versions of the related Office
software to use the site. The Office Live Small Business version of the offering
includes a Web site, e-mail and domain name free for one year.

About the Author

Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Enterprise Computing and Education Groups, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital strategy for the groups. She also serves as executive editor the ECG Web sites, and you'll even find her byline on PureAI.com, the ECG group's newest site for enterprise developers working with AI. She recently gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web technology may impact publishers' bottom lines. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.